“I’m afraid my mother and sister are swooping in,” she said, returning Katherine’s wave. “Mother has been . . . quite keen to meet you. Do you mind?”
“Not in the least.”
“She’s very impressed with your flowers,” Madeleine said under her breath, and the colonel slanted her another look.
“Only she?”
“No. Not only she.”
*
Madeleine made the introductions. She heard herself making them, saying the correct words, using the correct tone, and everyone shook hands correctly as she watched from slightly outside of herself, still suspended in the fleeting light. Still standing at the edge of that cliff, wondering what would come next.
From the saltwater bathing pool walled off from the bay came echoes of splashing, of children shouting and nannies chiding, and cormorants screeching for scraps.
People were beginning to stare at them again.
Mother was speaking. Katherine was trying to catch Madeleine’s eye.
Colonel Astor tested the bottom of his stick against the grass and shifted on his feet, the wind flipping his jaunty striped tie this way and that. For the first time, she caught a hint of his cologne.
Sandalwood, rich and heady. Amber. Bergamot.
*
“I didn’t think dogs were allowed at the Club,” Katherine was saying.
The colonel’s eyebrows quirked. “Oh, aren’t they?” he asked innocently. “Alas.”
As if on cue, Kitty yawned, showing miles of tongue and teeth. Madeleine and Katherine burst into laughter, spontaneously, loudly, and both at once.
It was one of the hallmarks that branded them as sisters, their matching laugh: low and full-throated, bubbling up without reservation. It remained the despair of their mother （who feared it revealed a shade too much a bourgeois background） but was as natural as breathing to Madeleine and Katherine, who both brimmed with appreciation of anything absurd.
Throughout their childhood, Mother had dressed them identically, to the frustration of them both. Chocolate-haired and blue-eyed, the sisters might already have been twins, except that Katherine was always a little taller, a little merrier, more sparkling.
Even so, the colonel’s attention kept returning to Madeleine, instead of fixing upon the brighter star.
“Miss Force! Colonel Astor! A photograph? To commemorate Miss Force’s win in the tournament?”
It was a young man in a boater and tennis whites, already setting up his camera and tripod on the spread of lawn just ahead of them. He must have been a member of the Club, although Madeleine didn’t recognize him.
The colonel looked at her. “Would that be all right?”
“Yes,” answered Madeleine’s mother, and tucked a loose lock of hair back behind Madeleine’s ear before moving to stand beside her.
Katherine grinned. Madeleine pushed more hair behind her other ear, and they all four faced the photographer, gathering closer, pulling the dog into the frame. The colonel’s sleeve brushed lightly against her own, electrifying; she clamped her arms to her sides, hoping she didn’t stink of tennis and the fried cod she’d had for lunch.
The young man removed his hat. He stooped behind the camera and lifted a closed palm to them, his fingers opening one at a time to count one . . . two . . . three . . .
Madeleine would have many years to reflect upon this moment. She would study it, pick it apart in a dozen little ways and wonder how things might have turned out differently had she been daring enough to overrule her mother. To say, No, I’d rather he didn’t take our photograph, please. I’d rather we all just turn around and walk the other way.
Set a precedent, as it were.
In her darker musings, she would wonder why Jack himself hadn’t said something. Offered her a whispered warning about what it would mean, a sidelong glance, something. After all, he had to have known what would happen next. He had to have at least suspected. He’d asked her if it would be all right, and maybe that was all the warning he thought she needed.
But the Madeleine of that particular afternoon was scarcely a month past her seventeenth birthday; she was teenaged and untested and sweaty and bedazzled. She didn’t speak the subtle code of the magnificently rich, not then.
To be honest, it likely wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. In the space of just that single conversation—the sea light, the clouds, his gray eyes and his dog—she had already made her choice. She was already plummeting off that cliff, ready to soar.
And so the shutter had snapped, capturing them in their untidy, sunlit line, about to become the cynosure of the world’s avid attention.